ANNA KARENINA REVIEW (CINEMA BLEND)

Reviewed By: Katey Rich

The film's biggest innovation is to set the entire story within a decaying old theater, a very literal translation of the prying eyes and strict rules of late 19th century Russian high society, where the upper class was so pretentious they spoke French amongst themselves. Wright uses the theater to stage all kinds of improbable scenes-- a horse race, an intimate bedroom encounter-- and occasionally lets us witness the stunning set changes, a choreography of actors and camera that rivals all the celebrated long takes in Wright's previous films. Characters sit among the footlights when they want to be alone, chatter up in the opera boxes to gossip-- but they are always trapped in this dilapidated theater, with no awareness that the world might change around them.

The one exception to this is Levin (Domnhall Gleeson), a farmer who only begrudgingly visits high society but who falls hard for a young girl (Alicia Vikander) who initially rejects him. Early on Levin pushes open the back door of the stage to walk into a snowy field, a simple but stunning photography trick that sets up a fascinating contrast between "real" and artificial spaces (in a film where, of course, everything is fictional). As Anna (Knightley) begins her torturous affair with the young, caddish Vronsky (Aaron Taylor Johnson) they frolic among real hedges and in fields of flowers, but they inexorably return to the theater, where gossips make their lives impossible. And even when Anna visits the frigid bedroom she shares with her stern husband (a marvelous Jude Law), the bedchamber can open up to the wings of the stage without warning. Love-- for a wife or husband, for a child, for an illicit affair-- is real in this story; it's the world itself that can constantly shift and redefine everything.

Tom Stoppard's fluid, very streamlined adaptation makes Anna Karenina a series of love stories, with the politics left to the fringes for curious viewers. The focus on Levin and Kitty's slow courtship contrasts beautifully with Anna and Vronsky's fevered affair, and though the martial fracture between Oblonsky and Dolly is one of the film's quieter notes, they're played so beautifully by Matthew MacFadyen and Kelly MacDonald that they feel essential as well. Wright is famous for working with the same technical team on every film, and all the elements of production here-- from Dario Marianelli's propulsive score to Jacqueline Durran's bravura costumes to Seamus McGarvey's sharp cinematography-- synch up so perfectly that the movie sweeps you along like the train on one of Anna's immense dresses. Anna Karenina is a massive, boldly imagined work, the rare novel adaptation that's purely, thrillingly cinematic.

READ MORE: http://www.cinemablend.com/reviews/Anna-Karenina-6160.html

Anna Karenina Review - IRISH TIMES

Climb on board for a gorgeous, risky take on the classic Russian novel, writes DONALD CLARKE

IT IS, WE TRUST, not giving too much away to say that Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has a great deal to do with trains. That vehicle offers us an irresistible metaphor for Joe Wright’s risky, gorgeous, unsentimental take on the most psychologically alert of 19th-century novels. If you chose to climb on board, you will be carried along at enjoyable pace. If you fail to make it into the carriage, you will feel furious, excluded and confused. In short, the picture is set to divide opinion.


For all the archness on display, this Anna Karenina feels as emotionally sincere as any previous adaptation. It helps that Wright has cast the film with such care and imagination. Keira Knightley, always at her best for this director, doesn’t have the greatest range – the two octaves run from fragile to neurotic – but, when safely within those confines, she is capable of eating the screen raw.

Knightley does very nicely as the Russian enigma, wife to a boring technocrat, who embarks on a ruinous affair with a glamorous but insubstantial army officer and brings social Armageddon crashing round her ears.


It says something about the odd progress of Jude Law’s career that, rather than appearing as Vronsky, the suave lover, he finds himself excelling as Anna’s flawed, oily, unattractive husband. One of the year’s key cinematic images will surely turn out to involve Alexei Karenin’s near-religious cradling of a rudimentary reusable prophylactic.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is callow as Vronsky. Matthew Macfadyen’s is hilariously bluff as Anna’s brother. Purists may argue that Domhnall Gleeson is a little slight to play Levin (an unmistakable version of the young Tolstoy) but our busiest actor makes a touchingly fleshy naïf of the idealistic young landowner. Far from being a stray subplot, Levin’s adventures form the moral spine of Tolstoy’s panoramic story.

READ MORE: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/theticket/2012/0907/1224323678366.html

Anna Karenina Review:Anna Karenina: Exquisite to look at, but this film lacks emotion By CHRIS TOOKEY (Mail OnLine)

Films don’t come more glamorous than this.

Tolstoy’s romantic tragedy has been filmed many times before, with stars such as Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh and Sophie Marceau, but it has never looked lovelier. Nor has Anna.

Keira Knightley, when lit like this, is a screen goddess. Joe Wright is the director who also made her look stunning in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Maybe she should always work with him.

As her paramour Count Vronsky, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (the renamed Aaron Johnson who starred in Nowhere Boy and Kick Ass) is attractive too, even if he’s blond and pretty rather than, as Tolstoy described him, dark and dangerous.


Perfectly laundered and ramrod stiff with a tangible air of entitlement, he’s as much a military love object as Terence Stamp was in Far From The Madding Crowd. You won’t see a better-looking couple.

The story of their adulterous love affair is as exquisitely framed as a Vogue fashion shoot – and as unmoving.

This Anna is vain and petulant, rather than a liberated woman ahead of her time, and Vronsky seems a good deal more in love with himself than with her. He’s a toyboy, not the mature man in his 30s who Tolstoy described.

Jude Law, excellent as Anna’s wronged husband, a socially aware cove who serves as a government minister, is infinitely more sympathetic – a long way from Tolstoy’s intention when he wrote the novel and fell in love with his own leading lady.

Another problem is that the two subplots are more touching than the main one.


The pursuit of Princess Kitty (Alicia Vikander)  by idealistic farmer Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) is sweet and unaffected.

And Kelly Macdonald steals the movie with a heartwrenching performance as Dolly, a woman unhappily married to Anna’s brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), an unfaithful man who underestimates his wife.

The most affecting moment in the film is when Dolly confides to Anna that Dolly admires her rather than regards her as a fallen woman: ‘I wish I’d done the same, but no one asked me.’


Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2198460/Anna-Karenina-review-Keira-Knightleys-new-movie-exquisite-look-lacks-emotion.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Anna Karenina - a review by FRONT ROW REVIEWS

(ANOTHER SPECIAL MENTION FOR MATTHEW MACFADYEN)

Casting wise, Knightly is wonderful as Karenina. She continues to play the pouty, dainty woman but from film to film, the women that she plays grow in strength, and even (if you permit me the pleasure), she has a slight tinge of Greta Garbo (who herself played Karenina) about herself where she can illustrate everything she is thinking through her eyes and her mouth – rather than having to say everything. She is the perfect example of fetishistic scopophilia, as theorised by Laura Mulvey. Parts of Knightly’s face becomes so entranced with emotions, that the audience concentrates solely on her lips, her eyes, her cheeks and they represent the rest of her body. Jude Law plays an interesting role within the film because we are so busy concentrating on the growing relationship of Anna and Vronsky, that we don’t really take the time to notice the angst and fire growing within her husband, Alexei. He tries, at first to forgive her, her misgivings but as she continues to pull away, he continues to fight until the end and Law is a constant reminder of this throughout the film.

The reminder of the cast is filled with recognisable faces (many of whom fill me with a smile whenever I see them), those we have become accustomed to the period drama including Ruth Wilson, Michelle Dockery, Olivia Williams and Matthew Macfadyen (who plays Oblonsky, Anna’s brother with such comic conviction, it’s a welcome return to the big screen).

Here comes the grouch part of my review – the one major casting issue I had was Aaron Johnson as Count Vronsky. Bearing in mind that he had to play the love rival to the older looking Law, Johnson looks like he has just come away from the set of Skins, with a very bad go at trying to grow facial hair. Usually, I am a big fan of him, rewatching Nowhere Boy and Kick Ass with excitement but in this film, he felt like a bad choice. It just seems like a bigger, more mature actor was needed for the role where he was needing to be sensual, but instead he just felt like a bad schoolboy teasing the girls around him. Furthermore, it felt a bit uncomfortable watching Johnson and Knightly kiss, not for their age gap but for the time they have spent in the eyes of the audience (the latter being around much longer) and therefore, I felt this lost some of the capacity for drama and scandal, which it could have otherwise gained with another actor.


READ MORE: http://www.frontrowreviews.co.uk/reviews/anna-karenina-review/18704

Matthew Macfadyen is a stand out in Anna Karenina - Movie Review

Whatever faults Tom Stoppard may possess as a screenwriter and Joe Wright as a director, timidity cannot be counted among them. Their collaboration in bringing Tolstoy’s imposing Anna Karenina to the big screen is one of real audacity: even on the rare occasions it falters, you have to applaud the ambition.

Between them, Wright and Stoppard have filleted and condensed this doorstep of a novel into two hours of screen time, fashioning it into a swirling, swoony, achingly romantic tragedy. Stoppard’s witty conceit is to present the story of doomed heroine Anna literally as a piece of theatre, played out beneath a proscenium arch with its own backstage, curtain and audience. But magically and playfully, Wright’s cameras open up the confines of the stage to expansive, exterior vistas. It’s dazzling to watch.

All this is accomplished while keeping the sweep of the novel and its diverse themes just about intact. With Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard showed a flair for teasing the earnest reverence accorded to literary giants; unsurprisingly he doesn’t tiptoe around Tolstoy. It’s a shrewd instinct. After all, Anna Karenina was originally published in instalments, complete with what we now call cliff-hangers – its melodramatic aspects are never totally absent.

Keira Knightley, who seems forever doomed to be sniped at by people more obsessed by celebrity values than acting skill, is a fine Anna – alternately charming, haughty, and dispirited. She raises her game under Wright’s direction, as her work in Atonement and Pride and Prejudice have already confirmed.

In an all-British cast, Matthew MacFadyen stands out as Anna’s randy, insouciant brother Oblonsky, while Jude Law pleasingly reins himself in as her husband Karenin – a dull, virtuous public man.

READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/9512044/Keira-Knightley-in-Anna-Karenina-review.html